Mark Begich: Claire McCaskill doesn’t understand

Alaska Sen. Mark Begich says fellow Senate Democrat Claire McCaskill is investigating contracting practices in his home state because she “refuses to try and understand the history and culture” of Alaska.

On Wednesday, McCaskill’s office blasted out a letter she sent to the Small Business Administration announcing her investigation into Alaska Native Corporations’ participation in the SBA’s small-and-disadvantaged business contracting program. ANCs are native groups’ extended special contracting privileges that other minority companies do not receive according to ProPublica, and McCaskill (D-Mo.) has been raising questions about them for more than five years.

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Begich, who is up for reelection this fall in a conservative state, called his Democratic colleague’s actions “troubling” and mocked her legislative specialty of investigating waste and fraud, an unusual personal attack between senators of an opposite party and even rarer for fellow Democrats. McCaskill is a member of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee and the chairwoman of a panel that investigates federal contracting.

Begich argued that McCaskill was taking “actions intended to unfairly punish our way of life in Alaska” and said her investigation into ANCs comes only because the corporations are proving successful, even under the oversight rules that McCaskill pushed for at SBA to tighten contracting restrictions on ANCs and require reporting of how they benefit Alaskan communities.

“Just because ANCs have seen economic growth and success, as they were intended to do, doesn’t mean they deserve this type of targeted attack from a sitting senator who simply refuses to try and understand the history and culture of a great state like Alaska,” Begich said.

McCaskill has long been concerned that ANCs don’t benefit Alaska natives and that they are used to “circumvent the federal contracting process.” Her letter to SBA Administrator Maria Contreras-Sweet this week contained a series of requests for her probe into ANCs’ contracting practices.